This essay is part of an Avidly cluster on Vanderpump Rules guest co-edited by Olivia Stowell And Jay Shelat.
It’s August 2023, and I’m ubering to a West Hollywood bar from Universal Studios, where I’ve been conducting participant observation research of the WGA/SAG strikes. I’m sweaty and tired from picketing in 85 degree weather, but my exhaustion can’t quell my excitement for the rest of the day’s plans: today is the day that I will pilgrimage to the two central sites of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules. My friends and I have reservations at both TomTom (named for disgraced VPR cast members Tom Sandoval and Tom Schwartz) and SUR (the show’s flagship locale).
When I join my friends Cecilia (a fellow VPR stan), Hannah, and Caleb (the latter two just here for the fun and friendship), they’re quick to tell me that before I arrived, another diner had been talking to the bartender about how he knows former VPR cast member Jax Taylor. Before we even enter the hallowed halls of TomTom and SUR, we’ve already inched closer to Vanderpump’s orbit.
As we get ready in our hotel room before our reservations, Cecilia and I put compilations of the best Vanderpump moments on the TV, hoping to express the show’s magnetic pull, though it turns out that the show’s iconic moments and catchphrases—“I’m not sure what I’ve done to you, but I’ll have a Pinot Grigio,” etc.—don’t quite travel out of context as much as we’d hoped. But nonetheless, Hannah and Caleb are along for the ride, ready to dive in with us into the physical spaces that launched a thousand memes.
First, TomTom. The decor can best be described as a yassified, steampunk Rainforest Cafe. In the middle of the front room is a massive, plasticky-yet-quasi-realistic tree sprouting from the floor. Across the tree loomed a wall of burnished metal replete with floating shelves. Our waiter is attractive in a California way, his face seemingly almost 50% shiny white teeth. At his suggestion, we order cauliflower wings and spicy tuna on crispy rice from the appetizer section of the menu (which is embarrassingly yet aptly entitled “Foreplay”). And, of course, we must have an order of goat cheese balls, repeatedly extolled on the show by former cast member Stassi Schroeder as the one thing she would always order. The wings and drinks—mine a prickly pear mezcal margarita—are surprisingly good; the goat cheese balls are…just fried balls of goat cheese.
After two drinks, my friend Cecilia and I head to the restroom; on the way, we think we spot the eponymous Lisa Vanderpump’s son Max at a corner table. From the toilet stall I furtively google photos of him to see if I’ve ID’d him correctly (I have). Cecilia tells me we have to say hello to him, so we do on our way back. Max does not seem to want to be said hello to.
He’s not rude, but not quite welcoming either. We read the room and quickly move back to our table after telling him we’re big fans of the show. I can’t help but suddenly feel a little sheepish about my own attachments to Vanderpump. How many other wacky fangirls must have approached Max—not even a real cast member of the show—while he was just trying to do his job running the restaurant? Why did we want to, or feel the need to, say hello to the son of a reality star at his workplace? What did we think speaking to Max would do for us, would give us? But also, why would anyone come to this weird-ass bar if not to feel themselves one degree of separation closer to their object of obsession?
And obsession is certainly what VPR cultivates. As Scandoval broke over the course of season 10, I absorbed several of my friends into VPR’s gravitational pull. Twice, friends stopped by my apartment while I was watching Vanderpump, and ended up staying to finish the episodes, simply unable to look away. And it didn’t take more than a few minutes of watching for them to participate in the kinds of moral-social evaluations that Ashley Rattner describes in her essay—to pledge their allegiance to one cast member or another, to declare others too trashy or too mean, to defend those who seemed unfairly maligned.
VPR exemplifies the soapy, immoderate hijinks that make reality TV absorbing fodder for endless conversations between friends and fans. These conversations transform someplace like SUR into a tourist destination, rather than just another anonymous faux-elegant L.A. restaurant decked out in crystals and colored lighting. The decade-long attachment of fans cathects the show’s stock locations—the SUR alleyway, the clock at TomTom—with a sense of pilgrimagish meaning. At the same time, though, as we wrap up at TomTom, we note, with a tone of mild amazement, that we would come back for the drinks even if the bar wasn’t associated with the show.
We make our way to SUR—the main event, the shrine of Bravo, the site of many a reality TV miracle. Amidst SUR’s Eyes Wide Shut-style lighting design, its dripping crystal chandeliers, its Byzantine hallways and maze-like layout, Cecilia and I point out the holy sites to the uninitiated Hannah and Caleb. Look! That’s the bar Scheana stood on to sing her song “Good As Gold” at her own engagement party! We order the show’s classic pumptini (sickeningly sweet) from that very bar. Above the bar, a TV plays—what else—Vanderpump Rules, which both intensifies and interrupts the feeling that we have become a part of the show, that we are potential background extras in the world of VPR. There’s the wall that says SEXY UNIQUE RESTAURANT in all caps! Look, that’s the alley where Stassi told Scheana to “hobble away!” We snap a few pictures, which fail to capture the alley’s aura.
And then! We see minor cast member Peter Madrigal himself, he of the failed dates with so many of the women cast members, he who judged a truly disturbing wet t-shirt contest on a cast trip to Mexico, he who possibly is the only cast member still actually working at SUR. Peter, unlike Max, seems to be here primarily to take photos with people like us. Cecilia and I approach him, Cecilia interjecting to tell him that I’m getting my Ph.D. in reality television.
“They give Ph.D.s in that now?” Peter asks incredulously. Yes, and I’m here doing research for it!
Caleb and Hannah decline to join our photo, not allured by the prospect of enshrining the memory of standing next to this pirate-looking man. Afterward, we head to our table. We spend far too much money on tuna tartare and sea bass ceviche, and of course, more goat cheese balls. On the menu, “avocado mousse” is misspelled as “avocado moose.”
We head home at the end of the night, a touch disappointed that we didn’t encounter more cast members but nonetheless glowing from our spatial encounter with Vanderpump Rules. (The next night, the Vanderpump Rules subreddit alerts me to the fact that the whole cast is filming at SUR—we missed them by 24 hours). As we’re falling asleep in the hotel room, Cecilia and I can’t stop talking about how the topography of SUR somehow didn’t line up with how it looks on TV. And then we talk about how we can’t wait for the next season.
“Next season,” Cecilia says, “When they’re at SUR, we’ll be able to picture where they are, and how much smaller and weirder it looks in real life than it does on TV.” We’ve only been out of the restaurant for less than an hour, and we’re already anticipating the way our encounter will shift how we experience the show. There’s something almost intoxicating about all of it—to go to the place, and then to proceed from being in the place and saying “this is where this happened!” to watching that same place on TV, able to say “I’ve been there!” From now on, we have become a part of VPR’s world of raising glasses high, of the best days of our lives.
Olivia Stowell is a writer and researcher based at the University of Michigan, where she has somehow managed to trick the universe into letting her watch reality TV for a living.